


call this fixer-upper home

by sagemb



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: Gen, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Not Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie) Compliant, Slice of Life, couch symbolism, endgame WHOM? in this house we are safe and happy, flamin' hot cheetos, italian designers, marriage is weird but sometimes it slaps, poor culinary decisions, vintage sofas
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-09
Updated: 2019-05-09
Packaged: 2020-02-28 18:13:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18761740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sagemb/pseuds/sagemb
Summary: Tony has a vintage sofa in his new penthouse. Peter likes to take naps on it.





	call this fixer-upper home

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gruoch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gruoch/gifts).
  * Translation into 한국어 available: [call this fixer-upper home](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20539571) by [everyoneisgay](https://archiveofourown.org/users/everyoneisgay/pseuds/everyoneisgay)



> This contains no Endgame spoilers. I have seen it. I enjoyed the hell out of it. But I'm grieving and I can't bear facing that movie head-on.
> 
> Title from Sleeping At Last's North.

 

Twenty years ago, this was Tony's life:

He is the youngest CEO of a Fortune 100 company currently alive. The beachfront mansion in Malibu is newly finished; the interior designer he’s hired to decorate the place is a thirty-six-year-old retired Italian supermodel. She keeps an outwardly lukewarm attitude toward his trilingualism. He’s slept with her twice already. When he goes on engineering binges, he dehydrates himself steadily through the day with Macallan and rehydrates himself in the mornings with three shots of espresso.

His last personal assistant has just quit. He poaches his new hire, a redhead, from Accounting: gorgeous legs and pretty enough but so prim that he almost feels bad thinking about how soon he’ll scare her off. Her name makes her sound thirty years older than she is.

His parents have been dead for eight years. He hasn’t been back to the house on Long Island since the funeral.

At the end of most nights, after Happy has closed the backseat car door on him, shutting him into the muffled quiet, he realizes how bored he is. The feeling lasts only for a moment, but it returns night after night.

Eleven years ago, this was Tony’s life:

A cave. He’s barely strong enough to stand, so Yinsen holds him up as he pisses into a bucket. The hand holding the car battery is shaking. The pain in his chest isn’t a pain anymore; it has mutated into a deafening sound, a blinding light. Voices fill his dreams: Pepper’s, his mother’s, Rhodey’s, Howard’s. He is very cold, and he is afraid to die.

This is Tony’s life now:

He is engaged. The wedding is in five months. Pepper’s hair is more blonde than it is red now and she has lines around her eyes, but so does he (his are deeper) and to him, she looks the same as she always has. They are utterly familiar to each other. He still doesn’t sleep easy and sometimes he skips a meal or two, but he has a psychotherapist, a couples therapist, and a physical therapist so maybe it all balances out. He is learning to cook.

He has a disgusting teenager to take care of. Said disgusting teenager, Peter, comes over after school two days out of the week and every other weekend.

“Why am I disgusting?” Peter is asking now, wiping Cheeto dust on his jeans.

“I can’t believe you just— _get a napkin_ ,” Tony says shrilly. “May raised you better than this.”

“Oh.” Peter looks down at his fingers. He sticks them in his mouth one by one, eats two more Cheetos out of the bag, and then wipes his hand on his jeans again. “You mean this?”

Tony thinks he can sense an oncoming heart attack. “I’m going to kick you out of my home. We bought it for $31 million. It doesn’t deserve to host this kind of behavior.”

“Yo,” Peter says incredulously. “I know real estate in Manhattan is, like, hella expensive, but I think you overpaid.”

His and Pepper’s home is a four bedroom, 4.5 bathroom, four thousand square foot penthouse on Park Avenue. The view from the living room is fantastic. They did not overpay. “You better not get any fucking Cheeto dust on that sofa,” says Tony. “It was designed by a very famous Italian designer and it’s thirty-eight years older than you are.”

“Whatever. Rich people are weird. You’re weird. Weird priorities.” Peter yawns. “I’m like, dead. Gonna take a nap.”

The kid thinks Tony is weird? Tony thinks the kid is weird. The kid takes a nap on this particular sofa nearly every time he’s here. It’s like the sofa is his _spot_. He never naps anywhere else, and he always sleeps like this: feet towards the kitchen, head towards the window, arm hanging off the edge.

Plus, he dips his Cheetos in ranch dressing.

“Inhuman,” Tony mutters, swiping the little dish of ranch from the coffee table and placing it in the sink. When he returns to the living room, Peter’s got one fist tucked in close to his chest and the other brushing the carpet. Tony watches his chest rise and fall for a few moments before gathering up Pepper’s favorite Afghan throw and tossing it over his sleeping body. Peter grumbles softly.

The penthouse has home offices for both Pepper and Tony, but Tony almost never uses his—he doesn’t work well in that kind of space. He grabs his laptop and settles into the armchair opposite Peter, answering emails in companionable silence to the kid’s steady breathing. His own teenage self took chaotic midday naps like this too, he remembers. On a different sofa in a different house in a very, very different time.

And now he’s as old as his mother ever was.

  


* * *

 

An hour and a half later, Peter opens his eyes, making a long sound like a revving motorcycle.

“Fuuuuck,” he groans, once his human language capabilities have evidently rebooted. “I’m—” He stumbles off towards the kitchen. Tony watches him stick his head under the faucet and snarf down cold water for a full minute before he crashes back onto the sofa. “I’m so confused. And angry. Is time real? I wanna wrestle a whale.”

“Settle down, buddy,” Tony advises. “Dinner before animal abuse.”

Peter makes the disgruntled motorcycle noise again. He makes a valiant effort to sit up; he gets to a forty-five degree angle before he collapses and burrows his face into the cushions.

“Did you say that this couch is fifty-five years old?” he asks, muffled by a faceful of velvet.

“What?” Tony shuts his laptop. “Oh, yeah.”

“S’older than _you_. Too old.”

“Maybe. But I can’t put it out to pasture just yet.”

“Why? It’s a grandfather couch. Heh.” Peter rubs his face, puffy from sleep. “You’ve heard of grandfather clocks, get ready for—”

“It’s called _vintage_ , kid. Stark family history. My dad commissioned it from an Italian guy named Gio Ponti as a wedding present to my mom. He had it flown from Milan to Long Island and everything.”

“Okay.”

“Ponti was a big deal at the time. He was in high demand—he was an architect, he designed a lot of buildings. For him to agree to design a custom sofa, even for Howard Stark? That’s pretty rare.”

Tony knows these facts well: when Maria hosted soirees in the south parlor of the Long Island mansion, the Ponti sofa played a regular role as a conversation piece.

“I’m pretty sure I’ve drooled on this, you know,” says Peter.

“I know, I’ve seen you sleep. It’s fine—form has to inform function, right? Nice walnut wood for the legs. The mustard-colored velvet’s gross, but it hides stains. And it’s weirdly easy to find other furniture pieces to complement it, or so I’ve been told. It’s pretty art deco itself, but you can go Old World or more minimalist around it. Even without me owning it, it’d probably retail for twenty grand at least. Did I mention Ponti was a genius?”

It’s strange, though, because Tony has no idea why he moved this sofa into his home. The couch he used to nap on as a disgusting teenager belonged to a different parlor in his parents’ house; this one was only ever used by guests. Maids came through and cleaned often enough so that it never gathered dust, but it might as well have been encased in glass and displayed in a museum for all that Maria or Howard made use of it.

By some standards, Howard and Maria had had a good marriage. As far as Tony knows, for all his shortcomings, Howard had never cheated. And they’d gotten along fairly well. They'd even made each other laugh sometimes. He just doesn’t know if they ever loved each other—if love was why they’d married in the first place. They certainly never said it; it wasn’t a habit they’d made time for.

But Howard was attentive to his wife in ways he never was to Tony, with the flowers he’d bring home every so often and the way he’d ask her for business advice on bad days, and she'd seemed to hold a better understanding of that cryptic, war-damaged man than most. Some would say, even, that love is a moot point in marriage as long as objective mutual understanding exists. That there isn’t even necessarily a difference between the two. Those people wouldn’t be voicing an uncommon or remotely terrible notion.

Tony can’t imagine living like that. He tells Pepper _I love you_ when he wakes up; he tells her when they talk quietly before bed. He loves her and he knows it; he knows it at all times of the day; he knows it fast asleep and unaware of his own self. He knows, in the wry pull of her mouth and the measured way she speaks when she really means something, that this life is more than he deserves, this one in this home with the scars on his chest and the family that twenty years ago he never dreamed he’d have. He’s been given more than one man ought to be allotted.

But here he is, with a Cheeto-and-ranch-breathed kid on his vintage sofa.

“It’s basically art you can sit on,” Tony finishes lamely.

Peter frowns up at the ceiling. “It… sure is a couch, I guess.”

A _couch_.

Tony stares at Peter. He is, in only the way this kid can make him, abruptly filled with delight. It's a couch, says the kid. Just a lumpy old couch.

“Good nap spot, though,” continues Peter, rolling over and sticking his face back into the barf-colored velvet. At once, Tony realizes that he’s never, ever putting this couch out to pasture. He can't. It would be a sin.

Then the kid says, “Do we have sriracha? I want grilled cheese.”

“Oh my God,” Tony says. “You know what? Fine. Fine. I’ll let you eat your gross biohazardous waste if you eat some Brussels sprouts too.”

“Deal.”

 

After dinner, which is admittedly not as terrible as Tony was expecting, he picks up Peter’s party-sized bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. He glances at the bowl of ranch in the sink. Considering.

**Author's Note:**

> This work (literally) could not exist without Gruoch, who a few weeks ago told me, "I have this [fic] idea that basically consists of Tony telling Peter the history of this Italian vintage sofa that his father bought his mother as a wedding present. It would deal with multi-generational family dysfunction."
> 
> And I was all like, "I would read the HELL out of that" and long story short she bequeathed the entire child unto me. So here we are. I am incredibly honored.
> 
> I imagined the Gio Ponti sofa (COUCH) being a little like [this](https://www.1stdibs.com/furniture/seating/sofas/gio-ponti-curved-sofa/id-f_8111093/?gclid=CjwKCAjw2cTmBRAVEiwA8YMgzaCoZGwopDqXn3JqTvwI1-4lfWB1RJJI8imGDfmzqPxBK4IC7hBbaRoCSnMQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds).
> 
> I am on Tumblr as [3wworms](https://3wworms.tumblr.com/).


End file.
